When a mysterious object passed over Mount Vernon, Illinois, on the evening of April 14, 1897, 100 citizens, including Mayor B. C. Wells, saw something that, as press accounts had it, "resembled the body of a huge man swimming through the air with an electric light on his back."

Reports of flying beings of human or generally human appearance are among the rarer anomalous phenomena, but they occur periodically. A "winged human form" was observed over Brooklyn on September 18,1877, according to W. H. Smith (New York Sun, September 21). Almost exactly three years later the New York Times (September 12, 1880) remarked on reports from Coney Island of a "man with bat's wings and improved frog's legs ... at least a thousand feet in the air ... flying toward the New Jersey coast ... [with] a cruel and determined expression." In a 1947 book Russian writer V. K. Arsenyev recounted this July 11, 1908, experience in the Sikhote Mountains near Vladivostok in the far eastern region of what would be the USSR:

The rain stopped, the temperature of the air remained low and the mist appeared over the water. It was then that I saw the mark on the path that was very similar to a man's footprint. My dog Alpha bristled up, snarled, and then something rushed about nearby trampling among the bushes. However, it didn't go away, but stopped nearby, standing stock-still. We had been standing like that for some minutes.... Then I stooped, picked up a stone and threw it towards the unknown animal. Then something happened that was quite unexpected: I heard the beating of wings. Something large and dark emerged from the fog and flew over the river. A moment later it disappeared in the dense mist. My dog, badly frightened, pressed itself to my feet.

After supper I told the Udehe-men about this incident. They broke into a vivid story about a man who could fly in the air. Hunters often saw his tracks, tracks that appeared suddenly and vanished suddenly, in such a way that they could only be possible if the "man" alighted on the ground, then took off again into the air.

One night in 1952 U.S. Air Force Pvt. Sinclair Taylor, on guard duty at Camp Okubo, Kyoto, Japan, said he heard a loud flapping noise. Looking up, he saw an enormous "bird" in the moonlight. When it approached, he got frightened and put a round into the chamber of his carbine. The "bird" now had stopped its flight and was hovering not far away, staring at the soldier.

"The thing, which now had started slowly to descend again, had the body of a man," Taylor recalled. "It was well over seven feet from head to feet, and its wingspread was almost equal to its height. I started to fire and emptied my carbine where the thing hit the ground. But when I looked up to see if my bullets had found home there was nothing there." When the sergeant of the guard came to investigate and heard the story, he told Taylor that he believed him because a year earlier another guard had seen the same thing.

Another soldier's tale of a flying humanoid came to ufologist Don Worley from Earl Morrison, who served with the First Marine Division in Vietnam. While stationed near Da Nang in August 1969, he and two other guards reportedly saw an extraordinary sight just after 1 o'clock in the morning. They were sitting atop a bunker and talking when they noticed something approaching them in the sky. Morrison told Worley:

We saw what looked like wings, like a bat's, only it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman. A naked woman. She was black. Her skin was black, her body was black, the wings were black, everything was black. But it glowed. It glowed in the night-kind of a greenish cast to it.... She started going over us, and we still didn't hear anything. She was right above us, and when she got over the top of our heads, she was maybe six or seven feet up.... We watched her go straight over the top of us, and still she didn't make any noise flapping her wings. She blotted out the moon once that's how close she was to us. And dark-looked like pitch black then, but we could still define her because she just glowed. Real bright like. And she started going past us straight towards our encampment. As we watched her-she had got about 10 feet or so away from us-we started hearing her wings flap. And it sounded, you know, like regular wings flapping. And she just started flying off and we watched her for quite a while.

Morrison thought the covering on her skin was more like fur than feathers. "The skin of her wings looked like it was molded on to her hands," he said, and the movement of her arms suggested they had no bones in them.

And UFOs

The Mount Vernon sighting took place in the midst of the great American UFO wave of spring 1897, and in the modern UFO age (which began in June 1947) reports of winged humanoids usually occur, or are interpreted, in a UFO context.

Some sightings are not of winged figures but of humans or humanoids flying through the air with the aid of mechanical devices attached to their bodies. The first known report of this kind was recorded near Louisville, Kentucky, on July 29,1880 (Louisville Courier-journal, August 6). UFO-age incidents include one from Chehalis, Washington, on January 6, 1948, when an elderly woman and a group of children allegedly saw a man with long mechanical wings which he manipulated with instruments on his chest as he flew in an upright position. Six and a half years later a 12-year-old Coldwater, Kansas, farm boy reportedly saw a dark-complected little man, with pointed nose and ears, float toward a UFO which was hovering nearby (Wichita Evening Eagle, September 8, 1954).

Three Houston residents reported what may or may not have been a winged UFO being in the early morning hours of June 18, 1953. As they sat on the front porch of their apartment building trying to escape the heat, an enormous shadow fell across the lawn, then appeared to bounce into a pecan tree. They saw the "figure of a man ... dressed in gray or black-fitting clothes" and bathed in a "dim gray light." Witnesses differed on whether he was wearing a cape or bearing wings. After 15 minutes he "just melted away," and shortly a "loud swoosh" sounded across the street, and a rocket-shaped object shot upward and disappeared along the northeastern horizon.

Even by the bizarre standards of flying-humanoid stories, the Mothman scare that hit the Ohio River Valley in 1966 and 1967 stands out in its sheer weirdness. Mothman's association with UFOs is speculative, resting on the fact that UFOs were manifesting in unusual numbers in the area all during the period of the creature's activity. The dozens of witnesses who saw it said it had bat-like wings, humanlike legs, and a broad trunk, at the top of which two big "hypnotic" eyes were set. Oddly, the wings did not flap, and on occasion, when Mothman (or a Mothman) got close to observers, they could hear a mechanical humming sound emanating from it. Otherwise it made a "squeaking" sound.

[- Eyewitness Sighting of Flying Humanoid -]

September 17, 2013 at 12:20pm

During the encounter, I was driving towards Ottawa, northbound on the 416 Memorial highway, it was about 12:20 in the afternoon on a clear sunny but very windy day. When I noticed at first what I thought was a huge seagull about 200 feet in the air ahead of me...within seconds I noticed the wings did not match the initial interpretation I had made and then saw outstretched arms, a head and torso with legs tucked together in a horizontal orientation. The wings, I could see now as I drove towards it at near 120 km/hr, were pure white and very large, its wings moved up and down rather slowly each doing a nearly 180 degree movement up and down. One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, I estimate its full wing span at 25-30 feet as one of my thoughts during the sighting was that the wings appeared too big for its body and i wondered how such long wings would be stored when the creature was walking on the ground...

So during these observations my car was steadily heading towards this thing that was also descending, bringing it into extremely clear view. The road turns a few times changing my initial straight ahead view to an up and to the right line of sight, eventually being directly adjacent to me when it landed about 75 feet from my car. So, now that I was looking to my right i could see it coming down to tree top level, still in a horizontal body position, gliding a bit more than flapping its wings like when it was higher...the sun light up the white feathers and the wings appeared grey underneath due to the sun and their shadow...The part that still sends chills down my spine was the being's human like characteristics yet not being like any human. He was The color of dark wet clay, face, lips arms legs and all.. He was also 12-15 feet tall judging by his height compared to the trees around him. His physical stature would make a 12 foot tall bodybuilder look like a scrawny pipsqueak...the mass and size of its muscles were beast like and very powerful looking.

I remember it looking over and down towards us on the highway and the look terrified me.. It looked at us like we do unto ants, but with a certain disdain in its glance. The best look at his face was when he actually landed, at this point he dropped his body to a vertical orientation and out stretched his wings to land...curiously i could see that in the heavy winds he was having some trouble..his legs and arms seemed to be being used as counterbalance but the giant wings were catching a lot of wind making him not completely stable upon final decent as his limbs were awkwardly jockeying for a balance point as his wings acted like a massive sail.

At this time i could clearly see the inner feathers blowing feverishly in the wind, down-like and soft, while the further to the outside of the wing I looked, the longer, stiffer and more defined the feathers became. So stiff longer feathers around the edges and down like feathers in the inner parts of the wing's undersides..I'd thought in mythological cartoon like terms that they were supposed to magically ascend with light and singing etc, but not the case here, where it was clearly affected by and had to follow the laws of nature from what I saw. It had no facial hair, but wore some type of headdress grey in color and had like braided or dreaded looking (pigtails?) coming out from under its hat on either side of its neck, behind the ears going to the back of its shoulders. I could see around its neck that it wore some type of robe matching its skin in color and being thin enough that i could see its muscles right through it, when landing i could clearly see each of its legs so it was probably kilt like on the bottom half of the garment.

He did not appear friendly or welcoming, the last seconds I could see him, was of his ominous glare towards my direction through my back window as I passed at moment of it's touchdown..his nose and upper eye socket ridges cast a black shadow over portions of its clay colored warrior looking face...It looked like he was here for a definite reason and the fact that we on the road could see him did not seem to bother it at all, at this point I lost visual contact due to converging tree lines between it and myself just before looking ahead at a road sign reading "exit 66 ahead", seconds after that I could see buildings in the south end of Ottawa for the first time, this thing literally landed as close to our nations capital as it could while still having fields with trees block it for cover. If you look on google maps, it landed in the field along the north side of the 416 hwy west of where Cambridge and Cedarview roads intersect and south of the river winding west to east.

The being was both the most beautiful and most terrifying thing I've ever seen...it has affected my life in a substantial and eventually positive way, but i live with some regret having not slamming my brakes and running to it, even if it had destroyed me i would at least know more than i can find out now, but the fear and shock was gripping and i was unable to make sense of or overcome it at the time, my plan was to take exit 66 and backtrack towards it, but found out that road was about 8+ minutes ahead at which point i thought the being would be gone by the time I winded through town and found the way to that location again, so regrettably that was the end of the experience.

I only took my eyes off it once, when another vehicle in the lane to my right came nearly into my lane as i was also distracted and veering close to his lane, we seem to have both noticed at the same time, corrected our steering, made a half second of eye contact and and both looked back up at it in the sky simultaneously at that point...he was driving a late 90's Buick of burgundy color and appeared to be mid a 40's middle eastern man with a buzzed haircut.

If he ,or anyone he knows that he has shared this experience with reads this, please please have them contact me through this site.

It has taken me years to come forward with what I saw and I've still only shared it with a handful of people until now, due to the stigma and rarity of these events they are not as easily received by others as say reports of flashing lights or disc shaped objects, I am not and was not religious (though I do now have ultimate faith), thus was not predisposed to wanting to see anything like this at the time, i did not really think about or believe in angels at all before the encounter, but can no longer deny their physical existence, only our understanding of them. My goal is to find others on that busy highway that day that i know saw it as well. (there were at least 15 other cars in close proximity to myself.) Before this event I would have found it very difficult to believe such an account from another person even if they were close to me. Understanding this, I'm uncertain how to best convey the event to you in a way that I would have been receptive to if that's even possible to share fully in words without seeing it for yourself.

I swear on my family, to The Most High that my description of and sighting of this giant winged being are true and as accurate as possible, thank you for listening.

I included a drawing of what i saw. I am no Michelangelo, but it is a pretty close depiction except that the pencil used to shade the body does not exactly match the deepness of the grey body color actually witnessed, and pardon the condition of the picture, as its been a little soiled in its travels.